


I am patient. I can wait.

by meependa (Hawkbringer)



Series: Hawkbringer's Greatest Hits [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst and Feels, Animism, Electricity, Environmentalism, Other, POV First Person, POV Nonhuman, Talking Trees, Telephone Pole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 07:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17075996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkbringer/pseuds/meependa
Summary: I was a tree. Before I was cut. Now I stand, a telephone pole, among my living brethren in a mockery of my forest home. But I still have my core, my memories. I am lucky. I am patient. I can wait.





	I am patient. I can wait.

**Author's Note:**

> Taking Biology in high school in 2008, for Extra Credit, I had the option of writing a story on the back of our single-page worksheet, from the point of view of a telephone pole in a forest. "Does it remember being a tree? How does it feel about that?" the story prompt went. Well, I went so far overboard with that prompt, I typed the story up on my home computer instead of scribbling a few sentences in pencil (I almost said crayon - we weren't THAT young by that point, jeez, Hawk) on the back of the sheet. Then I had to adjust the margins to near-zero, shrink the text size, and then carefully feed the slightly-crumpled worksheet into the printer to print out the story on the back of it. I personally thought I deserved an award for all the work I put into that assignment. So enjoy! I'm quite proud of this one.

I do not know where I am. I cannot see any of my branches, cannot feel any of my roots. I am thrust into the ground, yes, and branch-like extensions do protrude from my ‘trunk,’ if one could label this alien, constricted support I now have as such; a vestige of my former glory. But I can feel nothing, nor inside nor out. I can, however _hear_ , and that, perhaps, is the most disturbing of all. A dull rushing forever just beyond my auditory reach, a roar and whooshing that reminds me of… of… that day. 

The day I was cut. Men, men that come now to flip small switches and shut off the musically dizzying current that pulses past my arms day and night, do some work on the attached black vines that carry the current, then flip the switches again; these same men (aren’t they all the same?) are the ones who roared into my home, my forest, with huge machines and axes, horrible axes, that they brutally swung over and over into me and my fellows before me, and probably more of my kin after me, heedless of our creaking protests and the shrill cries of our steady guardians, the birds. We were butchered, slices by the terrible instruments and later, more blades, bigger, stronger, harsher than anything that has ever been wielded by man, and whittled down to fractions of our original girth, breadth, height. I am one of the lucky ones. I still have my heart, my core. I know there are those who are even now, not whole, not one with the ground as they so deserve to be. We are alive, you know. We have always been here, years and years and centuries and _millennia_ before the roar of machines and the choke of acrid air burned our leaves off and killed so many. No matter what man has done to me or my fellows that whisper to me in the night, anxiety evident in the way their branches creak and the way they point out the absence of the birds, year after year, I will always remind myself that I am one of the lucky ones. I still have my core.

To a tree, or a former tree, I suppose, a core is all there is. It is where our whole legacy begins, in the middle. That is where the circles of the sun and the bright beady eyes of birds begin – in the middle. Our entire story, from beginning to untimely end, is written in the build-up of such concentric rings. Man is obsessed with his straight lines, constricting and unnatural, and has forgotten the cyclic nature of things. One day they will return to the rats they began as. Even they cannot keep me from going back to the earth. History rises and falls, burns to ashes and sings at high tide. Yes, even as one of thousands in an old-growth Canadian forest, I know the tides. Being connected with the earth as we are, day and night, year in and out, nothing is beyond our reach. We have felt the encroachment of man, and here it has claimed me. My body broken, my limbs wrenched off, so desecrated now, even I would not recognize them. But I am one of the lucky ones. I am whole, I am as one with myself, and I have this lulling, frantic, sizzling music that rushes over me in throbbing waves, nonstop, as the wind once did, but I know now where it is from, and where it goes. 

It goes to feed man, man’s desire, man’s need. They abuse the power of the electric storm, that which can kill us, them as well, creating it in black chambers simmering with the wrong sort of heat, the wrong kind of turbines moving in an ill-begotten, unstoppable rhythm that _creates,_ day in and day out. Sometimes the messages that I can barely decipher in the cacophonous music worry that not even man can stop what it has begun in the coal-fed depths of the Plants. Plants. There are no plants there. None that I have ever known. And have I not known all? One feels these things when one is part of the earth for longer than one’s murderers have been alive. 

It is the _feeling_ I miss. Beyond sensing, hearing, deciphering – the primal way of communicating silently with the world that is, too, lost on man. Our contributions have also been lost on him. We produce their air! They are nothing without air, water, food (a foreign, ingested energy that man doubts, and not only because it is foreign), and we would destroy him if we had the will to do so. Refuse to breathe in the tons of waste their own bodies produce en masse, every day, and every day there are more of them. If we could, we would die, sacrificing our place in the Circle for the loss of theirs. But the Circle still commands us, and no one is autonomous, as man so wishes to be. We know that they have done little good for the world. 

They talk of it, the men that come to fix my black vines, they talk, but they never act. From what they have said, no one else acts either. But the Circle is patient. Their time will come. All those without limbs can do is hope and pray that it comes soon.

I am one of the lucky ones. I may not know where I am, I may not know how the ground beneath me truly feels, and I may not know how close man is to obliterating all that he needs to survive, but I know who I am. I am patient. I can wait.


End file.
